Many have asked me in response to reading my material, “What do I do about the self-rejection patterns in my life?” This section will give the keys needed to break out of self-rejection and love yourself as God’s creation.
Ignoring Your Heart Health is Not Spiritual
While it might seem like you are being “selfless” by focusing on others and completely ignoring yourself. This is not exactly self-less. Healthy love is not self-centered, but it’s also not others focused at the loss of your own heart life. You are no good to others in the long run if you don’t love yourself. You’ll burn hot for a while, but fizzle at some point when how you really see yourself rises to the surface. A person who forfeits their sense of self is doing no good to the people they are helping.
[shareable]A person who forfeits their sense of self is doing no good to the people they are helping.[/shareable]
We cannot ignore ourselves and think its spiritual. I watch well meaning teachers promoting it. All it does is cause people to give out more than they are receiving in their own hearts. This creates a hypocritical culture. We give out what we have not processed in our own life. This eventually leads to a culture that burns out, gets sick or is left empty.
It’s time we recognize the unhealthy patterns that cover over the fact that we don’t love ourselves as God does. We will never change unless we recognize that many patterns are congruent with self-rejection and not love.
Establishing New Patterns
When self-rejection is recognize, we are ready to change into loving ourselves properly, we can then address some of the beliefs that reinforce self-rejection. The biggest way to beat a rejection mindset is to break agreements and establish new beliefs systems. Those new beliefs need to be back up with action that come into agreement with God’s love for you and His powerful design of who you are.
[shareable]Transformation opens up when we say yes to God’s love for us. [/shareable]
It’s important to get real with yourself and those closest to you.
Here are some questions. When you are alone:
- Are your thoughts mostly kind to yourself, or are they hostile, rude and judgmental?
- Is there a ton of internal conflict?
- Do you have a hard time accepting how you look or your appearance?
- Do you waste time comparing yourself to other people?
- Do you feel like you are never good enough?
- Are you hardest on yourself when going through a hard time?
- Are your thoughts mostly patient, or are they perfectionistic and impatient?
These are the kind of thoughts that need to be confronted and cast down. Mark them as self-rejection and make them your enemy. Stop making yourself your own enemy, because that is what self-rejection loves to perpetuate.
Freedom all comes down to decisions. Here are some key decisions you will need to make to break the power of self-rejection and move into loving yourself as God’s precious creation.
1. Looking down on yourself cannot be tolerated anymore.
Most people allow abusive thoughts to stay around in their minds. A firm stance has to be made. Therefore, looking down on yourself cannot be accepted as a way of living anymore.
Our moments of sliding into self-loathing and patterns of rejecting ourselves is not helping anyone, including ourselves. Every time we give into them we only work against letting love has its work in us.
God loves us and accepts us, so we must come into agreement with that. We must learn to love what He loves, and He loves us! He loves you!
Rejection trains us to reject the love that comes our way. We must begin to take a new stance that our self rejecting thoughts cannot be accepted as ok anymore. It’s abusive to keep allow those thoughts to keep residence.
[shareable]We must learn to love what God loves and He loves us![/shareable]
Love Opens the Door for Change
Love sets the foundation for transformation, whereas self-rejection points out all the areas that have not changed and keeps us locked in it. Rejection never helps us produce change. It teaches us to hate ourselves, not the enemy. We therefore never embrace the true freedom that God’s love brings.
Only when we truly love and accept ourselves will we truly begin to drive out self-rejection. Agreeing with God’s love and acceptance not only ushers in the peace of God, but helps us to begin to let God work in changing our lives.
2. Let self-rejecting thoughts be exposed.
Your enemy seeks to separate you from experiencing love and will use every thought possible to accomplish this. That is why you need to become a professional at taking thoughts captive. Let those negative and self-rejecting thoughts be exposed and torn down. I often find this takes decisiveness and aggressive action for the greatest impact to manifest.
In order to grow in love, we have to stop allowing just any thought to have our attention. Too many people sit passively as toxic thoughts float into their thinking and chip away at their sense of peace and love with no action.
When we see ourselves with God’s lens, we not only accept ourselves, we learn to love and value who we are. Therefore we cannot tolerate thoughts and feelings from the enemy that devalue who we are. We cannot even tolerate words from people that diminish our worth and value.
3. Embrace the confidence of being loved by God.
One of the disciples who had the greatest understanding of God’s love was John. In fact, John referred to himself in his own writing as “the disciple whom Jesus loved.” (John 13:23, 19:26, 21:7)
Who does that? Who brags about how close they are to Jesus? Someone who truly knows and rests in the love that God has for him! He knew it and was confident in it. Because of John’s ability to embrace the love of God, I believe he was used to communicate some of the most powerful revelations of the love of God, throughout his many writings in Scripture.
Could it be that your freedom is hinging on you simply learning to receive God’s love for yourself once and for all?
Where do you need to begin to put your foot down on words, thoughts and even feelings that diminish and devalue who you are as God’s dearly loved child?
What kind of thinking needs to be banished from your life once and for all?
4. Begin practicing self-affirmation.
This is something that I teach people I personally work with. I equip them in a process of learning to affirm themselves with their words. This is very important to apply, especially for those who have a hard time being able to love themselves or receive love from other people.
When we need personal breakthrough, we need to use the power of words to help launch us to that next level. Sometimes this involves a declaration and other times it’s learning to verbally renounce something. As we renounce self-rejection, we also need to welcome the love of God.
The power of love arrives in the words of kindness. We have to start speaking kind words to ourselves. Most people who struggle with self-rejection often say a lot of words against themselves, both internally and even aloud. We are going to reverse this pattern by speaking words of kindness, acceptance and affirmation over our hearts.
We cannot wait for someone else to do this to us, although that would be amazing. Yet we cannot hinge our transformation on having someone speak to us with powerful words. Most of the time it is just you, God and the enemy. If I can empower you in those moments alone, you are empowered anywhere.
I tell people to stand in front of a mirror and look themselves in the eyes. For most, this is a very hard thing to practice because they are uncomfortable with looking at themselves. They’re not used to looking at their own image with great delight and kindness, so this takes a lot of effort and relearning.
I tell them to say the following things to themselves with the greatest amount of heart connection they can::
I love you and I accept you today just as you are.
Father God, you love me.
God loves me and accepts me, right now.
I am his son (or daughter) and He is proud of me.
I love myself.
I have what it takes to overcome today.
I can smile today, because I am loved and empowered to overcome. (this is where you smile at yourself)
In order for this to work properly, it has to be done regularly, preferably daily. Don’t sweat it if you have a hard time doing this, because we are establishing a new habit into our life. We have spent so long tolerating toxic thoughts and words that demean who we are. It’s time we begin practicing the love of God over ourselves. What’s the point in trying to love others if we cannot receive that same love for ourselves?
5. Start loving others out of the love you receive from God.
Some people, when they hear my teachings on self-love, make an unbalanced assumption. They think they need to perfectly receive the love of God in order to go out and love others. It doesn’t work that way.
You won’t all of a sudden perfectly love yourself and then be able to love others. We have to remember, because of our brokenness, self-rejection has trained us to have a very “ME” focused mindset.
When we don’t love ourselves, we can develop introspection, an obsessive focus on our issues. We’ll become so inward focusd we won’t even know what’s going on around us.
The key is that learning to love yourself involves saying yes to God’s love and then immediately give out what you receive. What we are are doing is opening up the proper flow of love.
Part of learning to receive love involves giving out whatever love we have to others. Even if it’s just a little bit, give it out. Even if you feel you don’t have any, give it out and God will meet you to supply the love you need.
Love needs to have a flow – into your life and out to others. Part of your healing is going to involve going out and loving on others anyway.
Whatever love you experience, let it flow out–first in gratitude to God and then out to others.
Prayer for Breaking Free from Self-Rejection
Pray this Prayer Out Loud
I ask You, Father, in the name of Jesus Christ, that You would help me learn to recognize the work of self-rejection in my life.
I will no longer tolerate thoughts and feelings that diminish or devalue who I am.
I will not tolerate words from others that release arrows against my worth and value.
I come out of agreement with self-rejection. I repent for this mindset and I renounce its ways. Self-rejection will no longer be a part of my life.
Release me from this burden, Father. Father please fill my heart with your love, affirmation and validation.
Father God, I acknowledge Your love and I receive it now. I say yes to your love the identity you gave me.
I come out of agreement with the patterns that were driven by self-rejection.
Forgive me for having a distorted lens regarding You and Your love.
Correct my spiritual vision so that I can see and receive from You and others the way you intended for me.
God, help me to value who I am. You made me and I choose to celebrate what you made.
Help me to appreciate, accept, affirm and celebrate who You’ve created me to be.
I am growing in loving and accepting myself.
I am growing in being more loving and accepting towards others.
Help me to walk confidently in Your love.
I tear down self-rejection and all its ways.
Release me Father from the programming of self-rejection that I fall into in the name of Jesus.
I am going to step out and celebrate who God created me to be. Help me to love myself and others as I know you love me.
Amen.
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